James Swallow - Deus Ex - Icarus Effect

The ghost figure became Federova, and she killed the first man with a slashing knife cut to the throat, dispatching the other two with quick, silenced bursts from her machine pistol. She trembled slightly as the camouflage effect bled away, the focused EM field dissipating.

Federova looked across at him as he stood up, her scalp beaded with sweat; and then she smiled.

“Go tactical” ordered Namir.

The elevator doors came off their mountings in a screech of torn steel, and Barrett swung out behind them, snorting with effort. He dealt with the guard closest to him with a savage backhand punch that drove bone shards up into the man’s forebrain. The guard dropped to the unfinished concrete floor, twitching as he died. Namir and Hermann came in a heartbeat later, their machine pistols snarling. Armor-piercing rounds sprayed in fans, taking more kills.

One of the guards was still alive, and he stumbled toward a side corridor, bleeding heavily. The German was on him in a moment, and with a haymaker punch from his armored fist, he crushed the man’s skull with single blow.

“Move,” snarled the commander. The mission was entering its full active phase; now speed, not stealth, was of the essence. Namir glanced around, his eyes narrowing. The thirteenth floor did not match the spy photos captured by the intelligence sources of his patrons. Instead of fitted deep pile carpets and bright walls patterned with subtle murals, the surroundings were bare and undecorated. The floor had the dusty scent of old concrete and ozone. Where mahogany doors should have led the way to opulent suites and apartments, there were yawning open frames walled off by ragged sheets of industrial polythene.

Hermann gave him a quizzical look. “This is not right.”

“No,” admitted Namir. “Proceed. And stay alert.”

“Company,” snapped Barrett, raising his arm. A group of four more thugs sprinted into view from along one of the radial corridors, each of them armed with a heavy rifle.

“Take them,” said Namir.

Barrett’s right arm came apart on expanding frames, the plating folding back, the hand turning aside to allow the mechanism within to emerge; he tugged an ammunition belt from a hopper in his backpack, swiftly slotting it into the feed maw on the base of the reconfigured limb. From the wrist emerged the triple-head barrel of a minigun. The muzzles spun into a blur, and with a sound like the buzz of a heavy electric generator, the cyberweapon ejected a gout of yellow fire and a storm of bullets. Grinning, Barrett panned the cannon across the corridor, ripping through the flimsy flakboard the guards used for cover, tearing into them, blowing craters in the surface of the unfinished concrete.

“Advance! Kontarsky’s rooms are just ahead.” Namir surged forward, and the others went with him. Reaching the space where the grand suite should have been, the Israeli reached up and tore aside a curtain of plastic.

Inside there was only another echoing, half-built space. Festoons of cables hung from the ceiling or snaked across the floor from drumlike power cells; the room was hotter that the corridor outside, blood-warm and dry.

“What the hell…?” Barrett scanned the room, his scarred face souring. “This is the wrong goddamn place! He’s not here… nobody is here!”

“Negative,” insisted Hermann. “This is the correct location. Kontarsky should be in this room. We saw the thermographic scans…”

“Why would six men guard nothing?” Namir demanded. He stalked across the open space, his footfalls echoing. Something about the dimensions of the room seemed off; in front of the windows that looked out onto the Moscow dawn, there were long glassy panes arranged in a barrier, running wall to wall and floor to ceiling. The power cords ran to connectors, and as Namir came close, he felt a steady surge of warmth radiating from them.

“White,” he said to the air. “Go to thermal. Target the thirteenth floor. Tell me what you see.”

“I have three unit indicators” came the reply from the sniper. “ Silver, Blue, Green. Multiple unidentified targets same location He paused, a note of confusion entering his tone. “ Youre in the room with them…”

“No,” Namir growled, reaching down to grab a bunch of the cables. “We are not.” He gave the cables a violent yank and they tore free from the glass, spitting sparks. The glass panes shimmered and went transparent as power bled out of them.

Hardesty’s gasp of surprise was transmitted over the open channel. “ What the hell…? Silver, all unidentified targets have vanished. Repeat, vanished.”

“They were never here,” Hermann said aloud. “The panels. They were some form of thermal blind, projecting a decoy image.”

“Real smart,” muttered Barrett. “So where is this creep really hidin’ out?”

“Find him ” demanded Namir.

Saxon nodded distractedly, and glanced around the marble lobby. It was gloomy in here, the only light a weak morning glow through the fan-shaped windows above the high front doors. Aside from Federova, the area was deserted.

He glanced back to find the Russian woman down on one knee, rifling through the pockets of one of the men she had just killed. A gasp escaped the guard’s mouth as she turned him over, a last breath leaving his lungs as she shifted the body.

“If the target’s not on thirteen, then he’s got to be on a different floor, shielded from thermographic scan.” Saxon gave voice to his thoughts, following them through. He cast around the lobby. “There are multiple lift shafts. One of these has to be a dedicated express elevator… Here.” He found a single set of doors off to one side, in a discreet alcove; everything about the positioning of it screamed Restricted Access.

“Use it,” Namir ordered. “ Well track your locators, vector to you.”

“There’s no call button here,” he noted, finding a glass panel set in the wall. “It may need some kind of key, or maybe palm print recognition—”

A heavy, wet crunch sounded behind him, and a blade edge clanked against the marble; then Federova was sprinting to his side. In her fingers she carried something fleshy that left a trail of red droplets all across the tiled checkerboard floor.

“Never mind,” Saxon reported, as she pressed a severed hand into the panel. “Red has, uh, improvised.”

The elevator gave a hollow chime and opened itself to them.

It let them out on ten, right in the line of fire from a pair of security-grade boxguards. The machines were steel cubes the size of a washing machine, inert in a monitoring mode; but when their sensors detected something that did not match their programmed security protocols, the mechanisms unfolded like a complex puzzle, extruding weapon muzzles and targeting scopes. They were the smaller cousins of the large, vehicle-size versions deployed by the military or law enforcement, but they could still be lethal.

Saxon rolled out into the lavish corridor, bringing up his machine pistol as he moved. Federova launched herself from the elevator car on those racehorse legs of hers, so fast she was almost a blur of motion. The boxguards dithered, the simple machine-brains of the basic robots hesitating over which target to attack.

Saxon used the moment to his advantage, coming up in half cover behind a cockpit leather armchair. He aimed with the Hurricane and squeezed the trigger, marching a clip of armor-piercing rounds up the frame of the closest boxguard, ripping it open. It stumbled into a wall and collapsed.

Federova was on top of her target, and she took off the machine’s primary sensor head with a spinning crescent kick. The robot reeled, and the dark-skinned woman rammed the muzzle of her machine pistol into a gap between its armor plates, and fired point-blank.